D R A M A++Q U E E N

Are you a slut, a slob or a sleazebag? Share your shame in Drama Queen for a Day
(04/14/98)

T A B L E++T A L K

Are schools giving kids too many days off? Discuss teachers' meetings, conferences and extended holidays in Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y

The happy prisoner
By Lori Leibovich
Because of Whitewater and Kenneth Starr, she may not be seeing the outside world for the next several years, but Susan McDougal regrets almost nothing
(04/22/98)

A death in the family
By Joyce Millman
Linda McCartney, 1941-1998
(04/21/98)

Paving the road to Yale -- or Palookaville
By Albert Mobilio
Public vs. private school
(04/20/98)

Scenes from a Shake 'N Bake life
By Jennifer Reese
In "The Lunch-Box Chronicles," former bad girl Marion Winik is so blissed out on momhood she makes Erma Bombeck seem cynical
(04/17/98)

Second Thoughts
By Sallie Tisdale
Awaiting surgery to remove a lump, I'm thinking not about losing a breast but about having them
(04/16/98)

BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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America's war on children

"The War Against Parents" is a nonpartisan jeremiad intended to break the ideological stalemate that West and Hewlett believe has blocked pro-family reform for three decades. There's something for everyone here, because they're trying to craft a big-tent family agenda. Being good liberals, they blame the usual suspects for the suffering of the American family: corporate downsizing, declining wages and government cutbacks, all of which they believe have eroded the social fabric that used to support families. But they also lend a sympathetic ear to conservative complaints -- about feminists who choose careers over motherhood and, later, sperm donors over fathers, bureaucrats who have built a foster care empire on exaggerated claims of child abuse, the cynical media that depicts parents as either oafs or monsters.

Theirs is a dark, dysfunctional America of selfish feminists and besieged working-class moms, evil corporate moguls and heroic downsized dads, television constantly beaming anti-parent propaganda into unhappy homes across the land -- Beavis telling Butt-head, "Your mother is a slut" -- and neglected children everywhere. But the something-for-everybody solution they craft to address these problems is muddled, self-contradictory and ultimately unconvincing.

First, a confession: These are my people -- good, left-leaning liberals with a contrarian, communitarian streak -- and my outsized disappointment with the book reflects a tribal frustration at the limits of contemporary liberalism to achieve crucial social reform. Liberalism faltered when it became a laundry list of gripes, with little to inspire voters to action. West and Hewlett's answer is to add conservative gripes, resulting in a longer list of grievances and requiring a sweeping social agenda that will no doubt accomplish their aim of uniting many liberals and conservatives -- in alarm and opposition.

Hewlett and West have been at this work for a long time, and theirs is a potentially interesting collaboration. Hewlett is a mainstream Democrat who traces her moment of truth on family policy to the harrowing experience of being pregnant with twins and working frantically as a tenure-track economics professor at Barnard College in the 1970s, and miscarrying her babies in the process. She was denied tenure anyway, and she bitterly remembers faculty feminists as among the most resistant to her efforts to develop family-friendly policies at the university. Her 1985 book "A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women's Liberation" harshly and often correctly attacked feminism for failing to defend women as mothers as it attempted to liberate them from compulsory childbearing.

West, a professor of religion and Afro-American studies at Harvard, is a socialist and a prolific scholar, the author of more than a dozen books, including the bestselling "Race Matters." He woke up to the way American policy thwarts family life when his wife divorced him and moved across the country with their 2-year-old son. He tried to block the move but found he had few rights, and he spent the boy's childhood trying to craft a strong father-son bond out of summertime visits and long-distance phone calls. Now he's trying to develop a fathers' rights agenda that limits the power of the legal system to deny men access to their children.

Hewlett and West find common ground with the right in blaming feminism for elevating the rights of women above the rights of children, fathers and families. They air those private grievances in the first third of the book, which is set up as a dialogue alternating West's story with Hewlett's. West has used this kind of format reasonably well in two book-long "conversations," with Tikkun founder Michael Lerner on black-Jewish relations and with scholar bell hooks on gender and other divisions in the African-American community.

This approach works when there's real dialogue and some difference of opinion. Both are missing in "The War Against Parents." The dialogue section reads like each spoke separately into a tape recorder and then tried to edit the results into a conversation. There's no difference, no conflict, no chemistry. The language alternates between overheated political rhetoric and the recovery movement's woundology. They talk over and over about our "parent-hurting" culture. "We parents are so used to being trampled on, sneered at, or just plain ignored that we often fail to understand how embattled we are" an early chapter explains. And I thought I was just tired.

N E X T__P A G E: Who declared the war on parents?